The Reckoners

by Doranna Durgin

  I did not just think the word battle.

  He reached inside his duster and pulled out his money clip. “Best if you order.”

  “Hey,” Drew said, across the long, narrow room from them and lounging at one of the turnstile rope stanchions. “We gotta fill my grill before we talk about the fact that two of us know a whole lot more than the other two of us. What do you want to eat?”

  “Fill my grill,” Trevarr muttered, repeating the words as though they left a lingering odor in the air.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lucia said, offering a dramatic sigh. “We don’t understand him half the time, either. The fruit salad, Drew. And iced tea.”

  Garrie told him, “Carbs, fat, and high-test carbonation. Do I need to translate that?”

  Drew snorted. “Fries, burger, cola, supersized. Trevarr?”

  Trevarr looked over at the counter, where the young woman behind the cash register had been about to put on an air of impatience but suddenly changed her mind.

  “Have a chili dog,” Drew suggested. “They’re spicy, though. Um, not that I scarfed one down earlier or anything.”

  “I have yet to encounter food here that I consider spicy,” Trevarr said.

  “He wants a chili dog,” Drew told the counter girl.

  Lucia, however, had crossed her arms, taking his comment as a challenge. “Then you didn’t eat the right food when you were in Albuquerque —” She stopped, tipped her head slightly, almond eyes regarding him from beneath a sweep of lashes. “Or did you mean here, San Jose?”

  “Here,” Trevarr said, and made a vague gesture that didn’t answer the question one bit.

  “Are you going to sit?” Garrie asked abruptly, turning a scowl on him. “Because the looming thing isn’t working for me right now.”

  Trevarr pulled a bill from the money clip, handed it to Drew, and returned to take the chair Garrie had left between her seat and the wall.

  “Money,” Garrie observed to Lucia, pushing it just a bit, “doesn’t seem to be a big deal.”

  “Tending this situation,” Trevarr said, “is the big deal.”

  “Why?” Garrie asked, blunt with frustration. “Why you? Why me?”

  Lucia gave her a wise eye. “Too, too late for that, chicalet.”

  But Trevarr only caught her gaze, silver eyes so much colder than she’d remembered. No yield in those eyes. No acknowledgment of what they’d been through in that séance room, not so very long ago. Still with the leather; still with that cool untouchable aura. The wood smoke had, somehow, faded. Something in her ached for all of it. Or resented all of it. Or both. She tugged the hair behind her right ear, hard enough to hurt.

  Lucia gasped ever so faintly as Trevarr reached out to that tugging hand, firmly but gently. He untangled Garrie’s fingers from the short locks, closing his hand over hers to fold it into acquiescence. “I,” he said, catching her eye with a much more direct look, “owe someone.”

  “So you said.” Garrie sat back, crossed her arms again — most defiantly, this time — and let out a huff of air. Holding his gaze — part persistence, part defiance. “You won’t mind if I keep asking, though, seeing what’s at stake.”

  “Ay-yi,” Lucia muttered, and fanned herself. She nudged her tote until it rested just so on the table, sat more primly upright, and speared Garrie with her own meaningful stare. “You’re not the only one who wants answers, chica. The moment Drew gets here with that food, the grilling won’t have anything to do with his mouth.”

  “Incoming!” Drew called, more timely than thou and swooping in with an overload of oversized drinks. “No dehydration for us!”

  Garrie and Lucia grabbed at the unstable configuration of sloshing cardboard cups, distributing them on the fly as Drew ducked away again, returning a moment later with their food piled into precarious balance on one tray when it should have occupied two or even three.

  Garrie caught her fries as they hit critical balance; Lucia spun a burger plate into place and snatched her own fruit bowl. Garrie grabbed the chili dog when Trevarr didn’t reach for it, sliding it into place in spite of his dubious expression. The next few moments were full of crinkling and salting and munching as Drew finally sat down to his own towering concoction of a hamburger, carelessly pushing change across the table at Trevarr.

  Lucia speared a grape on her fork and gestured at Garrie with it. “You,” she said. “Talk.”

  Garrie made an incredulous noise through a mixed mouthful of hamburger and fries, gesturing at herself. A swift gulp of soda gave her enough mouth room to protest under the cover of her hand. “Grill! Full!”

  Lucia pressed her lips together. “Swallow, then. And give us a clue!”

  Okay, that was only fair. Not Lucia’s fault that Garrie’s fingers still felt numb and her stomach rang hollow and something behind her eyes felt... inverted. Besides, the rate at which she’d been eating... she glanced down at the heavily chomped burger. The ol’ stomach could probably stand a moment to adjust. She managed to clear her throat and said, “They’re mad.”

  Lucia rolled her eyes and threw a graceful gesture in the air, fork notwithstanding.

  “We had that part figured,” Drew said helpfully.

  “I mean really mad,” Garrie said. “I mean, come on, these aren’t naive spirits. They’ve been here a while. But they’re so wound up they couldn’t even give me a moment to duck the Silico —” She glanced up at movement beyond their table, discovered the families in question descending upon the food counter, the youngest boy still hitching his pants around to some comfortable configuration.

  “They were hasty,” Trevarr noted. The chili dog was almost gone. If it had been spicy, he hadn’t appeared to notice. He picked up one of his curly fries and looked at it.

  “Eat it, don’t stare it to death,” Lucia said calmly. And to Garrie, “You’ve forgotten to make this about me, chicalet.”

  Yeah. Right. “You missed most of it.” Garrie could still feel her own surprise, her chagrin to be caught so off guard. “They tried to kill me.” She eyed the middle Silicon child, who hung off the queue rail to cross his eyes at her. “They tried really hard.” She hesitated and Lucia’s dark eyes flicked from Garrie to Trevarr, full of doubt.

  “Lu,” Garrie said, dropping her voice, “they worked together. They combined their breezes — and I don’t mean they just threw stuff out all at once. They wove it together.”

  “Caray, chic, that’s not good.” Lucia’s troubled expression spoke of understanding, even if Drew hadn’t quite gotten it. “Can you handle them?”

  She responded with more certainty than she felt. “Yeah, I’ve got their number now.” Not that she intended to mention Trevarr’s contribution to the moment. She could do without it now that she had the mettle of these ghosts. “It’s okay, Lu. But it tells us a lot. This place is ready to blow is more than true — it’s an understatement.”

  Trevarr deposited the curly fry back in the little cardboard basket. Drew tugged the basket in his direction, waited for objection, and then took hasty custody. “Yeah, but why? Did they give you a clue?”

  Garrie wrinkled her nose. “Not so much. Just some vague allusions to doom. They went nuclear pretty fast, once they had me in a place where they could. I think they’d decided that I’d be of more use to them if I was actually one of them.” She took another bite of the burger, but...

  Food, it seemed, was not helping.

  She put the thing back on its paper plate with a quiet sigh. “Truth is, we need to go back inside. We can’t wait for one of their special overnighters, but isn’t there a tour of the grounds we can take? And some uber-tour that includes behind-the-scenes stuff? Because we didn’t actually learn anything useful in there.”

  “We know they went for you last night,” Lucia pointed out, picking out the lone strawberry from her fruit bowl. “And they did it again today. So I think we know they’ll do it again. But we don’t know why — just that they’re too desperate to be smart. I felt that, t
oo.” She made a rueful face around the strawberry.

  Drew spoke around a mouthful of... something. “Yeah, but Garrie put the whup-ass on ’em, so we’re covered.”

  Garrie said nothing. Garrie thought of the cold, burning energy; her hand crept to her belly. She thought of the way it had tried to go places she hadn’t wanted; she thought of the way it had warmed her.

  Drew cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said, just a little louder, “but Garrie put the whup-ass on ’em, so we’re covered.”

  Trevarr watched her, elbow casually askew on the table, chair angled so his back was to the wall. Watched her with intent, even while scanning the rest of the room as additional families arrived and staked out their turf, waiting for the delayed tour. She knew what he was waiting for — worried about, even.

  How much she’d reveal, that’s what.

  “Garrie?” Lucia said, putting the strawberry back down.

  “Garrie?” Drew echoed, shuffling stray bits and pieces of his burger into one spot.

  “Garrie,” she told them, “nearly got slammed.”

  Lucia took in a deep breath, held it a moment, and bit her lip as she let it all out. “I thought maybe,” she admitted. “But it was so dark, and so loud — and they were so angry...”

  “Down for the count,” Garrie said, an edge of self-recrimination in those words. “Tied up in a nice ethereal bow.”

  Drew squinted at her. Swallowed his current mouthful. “But you came back. You dealt with it.”

  She glanced at Trevarr; he returned it with a steady gaze, and she couldn’t read him at all. She looked away. “It was a close thing, Drew.”

  Trevarr shifted — barely perceptible at that. A release of tension. Maybe not impossible to read after all.

  “And you’re ready for them now,” Drew said, still with that hopeful sound to his voice.

  She pushed her food away. Not only no longer hungry, but sorry for what she’d eaten. “Yes. I am.” She pressed her hands against the sides of her head; it seemed to ground the buzz. A little. “Well, I was looking for some action. Don’t ask for what you don’t want, right? Too bad Rhonda Rose moved on. I have the feeling she would have liked this one.” She glanced at Trevarr, thought briefly about explaining the whole Rhonda Rose thing... but he didn’t look all that curious and she didn’t feel like sanitizing the conversation for curious eavesdropping ears.

  “Chic, you need to eat.” Lucia frowned at her. “You know how you get after things are... intense. We don’t need to be scraping you up off the floor.”

  Garrie just snorted. “Been there, done that already today.”

  Drew disappeared behind the large soda cup to take a noisy gulp. When he emerged, his expression had shifted. “Hey,” he said. “At least there wasn’t any ghost poo.”

  Garrie covered her face again, just imagining it. “As mad as they were? We’d have been chin-deep. And there’d have been no explaining that away.”

  “Failure of the maintenance plant,” Lucia said dryly. “Unauthorized emissions.” Drew snickered, and Garrie giggled, and Lucia smiled at her strawberry.

  But only for a moment.

  For the café entrance filled with a gaggle of red vests and red jackets — a goodly number of them, really, more than seemed reasonable for any given shift. Their collective eye lit with recognition when they saw Garrie and her reckoners — and then did an equally collective double-take at the sight of Trevarr.

  “Inconspicuous,” Garrie muttered. “Not.”

  Trevarr might have growled. It might have been Garrie’s imagination. Hard to tell.

  But the horrified squeal from the counter-girl drawing sodas — what should have been sodas — that wasn’t her imagination.

  And neither was that sudden... smell...

  “I didn’t do it!” Drew said immediately.

  Lucia waved him off, lending all her attention to Garrie. “Garrie, are you — ?”

  “I don’t —” Garrie started. The food plate swam before her; she clamped a hand over her mouth and swallowed hard.

  Her reaction didn’t go unnoticed, not with the Silicons taking up so much room at the counter queue. “Mommy, look, that lady’s gonna puke from the stink!”

  Not from the stink, although it was strong enough. From the energies, a weird unfamiliar swish and sway that made the world move around and within her. Not the ethereal breezes with which she was so familiar; not the cold, burning energy Trevarr had fed her not long ago.

  Rhonda Rose, how much did you not tell me? Or maybe Rhonda Rose hadn’t known.

  That, too, was enough to shift her world.

  “Good Lord,” said Silicon Dad. “Don’t you clean those soda machines?”

  The children shrieked in horrified delight, exclaiming over the grossness and hopping to see over the counter, while Silicon Mom glared at Garrie as if it must somehow be all her fault. The red-jacket people, originally focused on Garrie’s table, hesitated where they were, uncertain.

  A vast belching noise shook the cafe, rattling windows and eliciting screams and shrieks and instinctive ducking.

  “I don’t think I can —” Garrie started again, through the fingers still over her mouth.

  “No,” Lucia said firmly, shoving her hastily emptied fruit bowl in front of Garrie. “Don’t.”

  Trevarr reached inside his duster, withdrew the disk, glanced at it, and tucked it away before Garrie could so much as give it a covetous glance.

  Probably just as well. She’d had her share of unfamiliar energies already today.

  Lucia stood, plucking up her tote, and made the decision for them all. “We’re outta here.”

  Drew pulled his curly fries in closer. “But I’m not —”

  “Yes,” she said. “You are. We’ll get some real food at Safeway — it’s just down the block. Or we’ll get room service; they had some very fine things on that menu.”

  “Room service!” Drew said, shoving back his chair as he got to his feet. “Okay, we’re outta here.”

  “I don’t feel very good,” Garrie finally managed to say. Past that first flush of potential barfing and into the first flush of potential passing out.

  “Exactly,” Lucia said. “Come, people. Up with you, Garrie. Fresh air, chicalet.”

  Trevarr, too, had come to his feet — no chair scraping, no untoward extra movement. Just... there. Another hollow, echoing belch rattled the room, eliciting a new round of shrieks — as well as the sudden exodus of the most recently arrived tourists, right through the red-jacketed clump of managerial types.

  “There,” Lucia said, satisfied — as if she hadn’t grabbed for a steadying chair just like everyone else. “They’ve broken a path for us.”

  “I’m up,” Garrie said, thinking it so. And then, “Am I up?”

  Quite suddenly, she was. On her feet, a steadying hand curved around her ribs. Snug up against that long leather coat, tucked so neatly beneath arm and shoulder.

  “You’re up,” Lucia said. “Let’s go.”

  Garrie moved her feet and left the rest to everyone else. In fact, she just plain closed her eyes, and at some point she was aware that the air had turned fresh on her face, that bright sunshine hit her closed eyelids but quickly gave way to dappled shade and asphalt to grass. City noise filled the distant background with rumbling trucks and tires humming against asphalt, but also the discordant twitter-chirp of birds quarreling over tourist scrap and tree-turf.

  The energies here rippled more shallowly. The weakness receded; her feet began to feel as though they might just be attached to her body after all.

  And by then they stopped moving. Trevarr lowered her lightly to the ground; she might as well have been a sack of feathers.

  Come to think of it, she felt like a sack of feathers.

  “Come, chic,” Lucia said, crouching down so her voice came level with Garrie’s ear. “Time to open your eyes, yes?”

  “What was that?” Drew asked, facing the other way — presumably looking back a
t the house. “Aren’t the spirits tied to the house? And... something about all that just didn’t seem...”

  “Ghostish,” Garrie said, barely any sound behind it.

  “Ah, so you are there,” Lucia said. “I thought so. Open your eyes, rejoin us. Speak.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 12

  A Sunny Parking Lot

  Cultivate an unobtrusive presence.

  — RRose

  Yeahhhh, dead people totally see me back.

  — Lisa McGarrity

  Garrie assayed a cautious squint. Bright mid-day sun splashed off the cars in the parking lot and heated up the asphalt, but she found herself on thick, cultivated grass populated with several well-tended trees. A parking lot divider.

  She found Trevarr, too — he’d crouched beside her, hunkering down in such a way that made her think he could simply hang out for days, waiting, if he had to. He wore his sunglasses again, but it wasn’t like those eyes gave anything away anyway. Lucia and Drew stood nearby, hovering just a little.

  Garrie shook her head — carefully. “I’ve never felt anything quite like this. It doesn’t... um... agree with me.”

  Lucia snorted. In a princess way, of course.

  “We need to come back. To see more.” She squinted at Lucia. “I did say that out loud, before — didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Lucia confirmed, but she looked doubtful.

  Drew made a dismissive noise, plumping himself down in the grass behind Garrie — leaning back on his arms, his face tipped up like a sun geek. “Waste of time if we have to work around the tourists,” he said. “No wonder Garrie got slammed. Those people... totally in the way.”

  Garrie laughed, as unconvincing as it was. “You can be sure they’re saying the same about us right now.”

  “I think right now they’re looking for the fastest way to hose themselves off. They really should have gotten out of the café.” Lucia tipped her head in the direction of the building. “But Drew has a point, yes? What do we gain by doing that again?”

  “Nothing,” Trevarr said, a deep growl of counterpoint.